Professionals, academics, researchers and others involved in writing academic or research papers or other manuscripts are constantly faced with the time consuming and complicated task of finding a journal or other publishing entity that will publish their manuscript. The task of finding the right source for publication involves identifying and compiling a list of possible journals, determining which may be best suited for the particular article or research, and then submitting the manuscript to the journal for consideration.
An individual author faced with this task may not have adequate resources available to compile a list of possible journals, may not have the time necessary to do so, or may be working with old or outdated information. The individual author also probably does not have more detailed information, such as the likelihood that a particular journal will publish his or her manuscript, or what topics are currently more likely to be published. An individual author would also not have the ability to easily send his or her manuscript to multiple journals for consideration without considerable extra effort.
As used herein, the terms article, work, manuscript, and paper are used interchangeably to refer to the work of an author intended for submission and publication. Also as used herein, journal, publisher, and publication are used interchangeably to refer to a publishing entity, whether electronic or hard “paper” publication, involved in soliciting and/or receiving papers or other works from authors for publication—for example publication in a journal or transaction. Such articles or works include but are not limited to research papers on a topic of particular interest, such as technical papers, medical research papers, legal research papers, etc., and are often involved in peer review proceedings. These works may also include bibliographies, or lists of citations, that reference other works or manuscripts cited to by the author. These bibliographies may be in a commonly accepted format and may also be created by scanning a manuscript for citations and generating a list of the citations that may be automatically managed and updated. Problems often encountered by authors involved in research and publication is that research is distributed among many institutions, both private and public, and historically there exists a logistical disconnect separating the authors and the publishing entities. Information sources and other collections of information exist that may help an author identify a journal or other publication suited to publish his or her manuscript. However, these sources of information may not be readily available and do not analyze an author's manuscript to provide suggestions and analysis tailored to the particular author and the particular manuscript. The widespread use of computers, databases, and large scale electronic media and storage of electronic data has resulted in a vast ocean of data. Such data may be very helpful to researchers attempting to identify publishers well-suited to publish research papers and other works. One problem is that the data is not readily usable to an individual author or if it is available it would be unmanageable and require considerable amounts of time to wade through. An author using the available sources of information would be required to manually parse the available data to match his or her manuscript with a journal or other publication suited for the particular manuscript. This task is tedious and time consuming and expends effort that the author could exert on performing additional research or on writing or editing manuscripts.
What is needed is a system that is integrated into an author's word processing software that analyzes a manuscript and the manuscript's bibliography to determine which journals or other publications would be best suited to publish the manuscript. Also, the system would need to be able to inform the individual author of the likelihood of publication with any particular journal and would need to be able to provide the author with detailed information on past published articles, topics of interest, other similar authors.